The only certainty in this arrangement is that the hot dog cart would lose money. I don’t know exactly how Trump would accomplish this, but he always has, and always will. In the course of operating the hot dog cart he would also manage to break at least half a dozen laws involving vendor licensing, food safety, fraud, theft, trespassing, and income tax evasion. Eventually authorities would seize the cart, causing Trump to take to social media with an all-caps tirade of insults and racial epithets against everyone involved. 
a) “Smart”, “clever”, and “wise” are not synonyms.
b) Many people see no connection between personality and politics. I think they should rethink that. Patriarchy is a political situation, a set of ideals and agenda items and priorities and whatnot, and it most definitely has a personality. And Donald Trump embodies them. I don’t think it’s fake, for whatever that’s worth, although I think some of his individual positions and claimed values (e.g., fervent fundamentalist Christianity) are fake as hell.
c) That personality structure is meshed with short attention span, belligerence, an obsesson with “winning” and tendency to opt for adversarial rather than communal-compromise-compatibility ways of interacting, authoritarian concentration of power, cruelty, dominance by fear. Those, in turn, are often found as components of a certain style of head-butting immediate showdown winning. A lot of human interaction and collective human enterprise are not well-suited for inclusive democratic peaceful egalitarian styles — think battlefields, if not wars, for one example.
d) Patriarchy, the hegemony of that particular style of masculine personality as a way of being in the world, and male sexual supremacy along with it, have been on the decline (because they’re far less useful outside of survival-mode / crisis-mode situations; our species is only at risk from itself nowadays, with belligerence a threat, not a good response to threat, at this point). That means those who love it have been on the defensive and feeling threatened, or more threatened than their default worldview, and along comes a symbol and figurehead with a damn big bullhorn.
He’s not unintelligent, (not the word I’d pick at any rate; his defects are defects of that personality and worldview more than individual deficits of the brain). He expresses that particular package of sentiments well. He isn’t the architect of how and why those sentiments resonate though, if you see what I mean.
Money? No, that’s one thing that he emphatically does not have. I have more money than he does. So do you. So does everyone else on this message board. I suspect that everyone in history has more money than he does.
It’s a sign of pathology in our society that it’s possible for someone like him, with record-breaking levels of negative money, to nonetheless be filthy rich.
Has he ever even claimed those things?
The totally bizarre thing about our world is that assets and debts don’t cancel each other out. In any sense that’s at all meaningful, he has scads of money.
Well, he certainly has control over, and use of, scads of money. Far more than anyone on the Dope. Despite, as @Chronos says, an almost certainly negative net worth.
Which goes along with the old saying:
If you owe the bank $100, you have a problem.
If you owe the bank $100 million, the bank has a problem.
Dominance by fear? I’m not afraid of really bad, really stupid clowns. I would love to snicker and laugh in his face.
Dominance. Right.
I’m not at all sure that he’s ever publicly claimed “fervent fundamentalist Christianity,” but he has certainly claimed things and done things to at least suggest to his audience – which largely does consist of people who are either are fervent fundamentalist Christians, or at least self-identify as Christians (even if they aren’t really practicing) – that yes, he is a Christian (such as infamously holding up that Bible when he went for the walk to the chapel during the George Floyd protests). But, I’m fairly convinced that it’s all performative, as he knows that it’s what his audience wants to see and hear; I strongly doubt that he has any actual Christian faith whatsoever.
As far as the OP’s question, and all of the below is just my opinion, based on observation:
- I strongly agree that he is a narcissist. At least part of that, we can blame on his father, Fred, who seems to have built that “I am the most incredible person ever” belief in his son’s psyche. I believe that that also feeds into his repeated proclamations of his own superior intelligence (“very stable genius”).
- I would not be surprised if he has some manner of learning disability, which might explain the disinterest in reading, and the relatively poor actual performance he appears to have had in school (and paying others to do his work for him).
- I don’t know that he’s particularly stupid or of low intelligence, overall, but I don’t think that he’s very smart in the absolute, either.
- I don’t think that he’s particularly interested in introspection, or examining or acknowledging his own shortcomings and weaknesses, due to the narcissism – I think that he actively avoids (or denies) any information that is in conflict with his own self-image.
Bill Gates told a story a few years ago about having met Trump on two different occasions, and both times, Trump asked him to explain the difference between HPV and HIV. He did not remember having asked Gates the first time, so Gates had to explain it a second time.
Trump does not have the kind of intelligence where a person hears, processes, and retains information. He is a pure narcissist and that kind of cognitive function has no value for him. But this is not, as has been extensively hashed out, the only form of intelligence.
Nevertheless, on that type of intelligence, Trump has approximately the IQ of a large scoop of aquarium gravel.
Used aquarium gravel.
I mean … there is a kind of logical consistency to that. The guy is a bottom-feeder.
Also, for those of you who cynically peg him as a non-reader …
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony [sic] War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
–Vanity Fair, 7/2015
So there.
I think donald dump owes a LOT to his father. Daddy made him rich and famous. Without his Dad, NONE of us would be discussing him right now.
I don’t care what Ivanka told her lawyer. Reading is strongly correlated with writing skills. Trump writes like an eight-year-old. Reading is motivated by natural curiosity. Trump has none. Extensive reading is strongly correlated with knowledge. Trump has very little actual knowledge about anything, except apparently about the merits of injecting chlorine bleach to cure COVID.
Ivana (because it’s the Dope).
My post was sarcasm. The only book we know he’s read is a book of Hitler’s speeches.
He also, allegedly, has read “All Quiet On The Western Front.”
So … if my math is right … we’re somewhere around two (the article linked would have that number at somewhere just south of three, but …)
I could readily believe there’s some sort of diagnosable learning disability at play here. Yeah.
As easy as it is for Trump to riff in Endless White Grievance Mode, ostensibly unscripted, his struggles with the printed word – Teleprompter or printed script – are nigh unto legendary, and can be painful to watch.
Trump is lazy. And he’s never had to work at anything.
Trump might be capable of intelligence but his brain is as flabby as his body. He’s never had to work on anything, physically or mentally. His entire life he just asks for things and they’re handed to him. So he’s never developed any skills for working for something.
Look at the lies he tells and the crimes he commits. None of them are smart lies or smart crimes. But Trump was never punished for doing anything wrong so he never needed to develop any skills in wrong-doing.
Trump was a failure as a businessman. But his father and his grandfather were good businessmen and Trump inherited money. A lot of people see that Trump is rich and just assume he must be a good businessman. But Trump is only rich because he was born rich.
The only reason Trump became President is because other people had set up a system for stealing elections. Trump ran for President and lost the election. But he became President because you can come in second place and win if you’re a Republican.
I think he started off as a reasonably intelligent person. There has been a pretty sharp cognitive decline in recent years. If you look at him speaking years ago before his political aspirations it’s clear something has gone downhill. Not that he was a genius or a good person then but his ability to communicate ideas was much better.
In addition to the above, I’d say he’s very likely nearsighted or suffering from some other visual impairment. He’s likely been tood many times to wear glasses, but refuses because it offends his narcissism. That’s why he writes in all caps with a Sharpie and why he struggles with teleprompters, especially when they use a word he’s not familiar with and he struggles to convert it into something he knows, as in how “they manned the ramparts” turned into “they manned the air, they rammed the man parts, they took over the airports”. He likely does use readers in private, and I recall him slipping on a pair once during a speech when he had to read from a piece of paper that probably wasn’t in the large print he demands for his briefings.
His use of seemingly random capitalization I would attribute to his probably having to memorize part of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in school, noticing that They always capitalized Nouns in those Days, and never bothering to look into it further.
That’s a really insightful take.
I remember reading one of the books about (disgraced cyclist) Lance Armstrong. IIRC, the author posited that Armstrong’s freakishly high VO2 Max that was largely attributed to genetics.
They went on to speculate about how many others might have such genetics, but never got into running, triathlon, or cycling the way Armstrong did.
So, maybe Trump does have some predisposition for … some kind of easily discernible smarts, but boasting of them is as far as he ever got toward actually putting them to use.
I believe this is an important point to understand about him. He’s always had others to do whatever he wants, to serve him. He’s the “big ideas” man; underlings are left to do the heavy lifting of actually accomplishing what he orders.
One way to sum it up: he’s never had to hang up a used towel; just drop it on the floor for a minion to tidy away, let alone wrangle an umbrella.